Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 7, The Great Escape Routes and the Future Fallback Base

My delving into Minecraft is minimal these days, I remember the good old times where I would join a community of players and we would make whole cities and communities. Of course I could still join a server and get back into this again but I guess I’m just a bit fatigued with the game I’ve been playing it that long. I used to work on my Brick Mansion every major patch to add new things, but at some point I just decided that was enough and just left it, mind you it had been finished for a long time I was just adding and redecorating. Though one of things I always wanted to do was create more secret fallback tunnels with powered minecart tracks that you could zoom along and escape a potential invasion. I already had one from my bedroom to the nearby village in case the house gets invaded, but I needed more, something that went far away to an (also secret) fallback base. So I searched around for a bit and found an island just a little bit away from the taiga forest across a small bit of ocean and decided to was far enough away to be safe from would-be invaders.

My original escape tunnel had lots of more powered rails

I decided to make the entrance to the secret tunnel in the pool hall as the idea was to make it a wall switch that activates a secret door. But because I don’t know enough about redstone I just had to make it a normal door on the wall, but the problem with that is you can see the door right there and because the wood on the wall is jungle planks I had to use a jungle door which as you may remember has holes in it. So it wasn’t really a secret entrance but nevermind I’ll fix that later. 

Ahh no one will notice that XD

Entryway from the (8-ball) pool room with chest of minecarts (yes minecarts) I like having the torches in their own little alcoves sometimes as it looks cool although doesn't give off that much light.

 So then I started digging, and digging, and digging, and digging out the tunnel, I joined up my original escape tunnel with the new one so now you had two options of where to go and dug the rest of the tunnel underneath the forest towards the sea. I stopped at one point as I noticed I had dug into a cave, so I made another secret exit in the middle of the forest.

One of the tunnels with a ladder to the forest exit

The Taiga forest to the southwest of the mansion, you can see the cave entrance at the bottom of the screenshot

Once I was nearing the ocean things were going to get tricky, I wanted to create a tunnel of glass underneath the ocean to the island with the fallback base. So as soon as I came in contact with water I stopped putting torches for light in the tunnel as it can’t have any light otherwise you could easily see it from above the water. So I built the glass tunnel into the bank and zigzagged across the ocean floor at one point dredging out a hill to make it a bit lower. I got to the island and tunnelled into a large cave which was accessible from the surface via a tall shaft, I was thinking of making the fallback base on the surface built into a mountain but then I thought that it may be safer built into the cave as we’re trying to hide from invaders aren’t we? I could make a lookout on the surface I guess. Minecraft really needs a way of making lifts as ladders are a bit too flimsy and stairs take up a bit of space but that may be a bit sophisticated for the base Minecraft as there’s redstone but no rope/pulley system in it really.

The entrance to the ocean tunnel

It's dark down here

See the dolphins!

Glass tunnel exit

The fallback base 'cave'

 After doing some test runs I managed to give the Minecarts enough speed to get through the glass tunnel stretch without needing more speed which worked out well as without any lighting the tunnel was pretty hard to see.

A few shots of the underwater tunnels

As that’s as far as I got really I just wanted to make the tunnels and they are pretty cool, especially the underwater bit as you can see all of the undersea creatures. Speaking of which there are now lots of more undersea creatures as of update 1.13 The Update Aquatic yes there are now dolphins, fish mobs and turtles to look at which is a welcome change from just the damn Squids. But anyway this was just a quick update, I may keep working on the fallback base at some point or maybe even update the mansion again but for now it’s finished.

A flythrough of the fallback tunnels

JD

Time for Plan B